[keefe]

I did some front end work as a primarily back end guy - I've found that doing some nodejs has helped my core javascript altogether. You have to let go of your ideas about classical languages - but consider ES6, at least you get the class keyword back. The concurrency model is that you have a single thread with an event loop, which never interrupts segments, it waits for an asynch call with a callback or for the function to end. So, your problem is event loop cleanliness vs mutex management.

I would focus on one of the big view players - React or Angular, from facebook and google. It seems like the old school jquery dom updates is out of fashion now. I wouldn't worry about the toolset, it sucks - webpack I guess has some uses.

I would focus on the core thing, e.g. React and javascript fundamentals. Tooling and stuff will follow along once you get a job in it.